Posts Tagged ‘RAW’

In Lounge, the weekend section of the business paper Mint, the columnist Aakar Patel doffs his hat to Prakash Belawadi, the Bangalore engineer who became an Indian Express reporter, who became a magazine correspondent, who became a television chat show host, who launched a journalism school, who launched a weekly newspaper…

Who made a national-award winning English film, who makes a hit TV serial—and who is winning accolades for his role as a Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) agent in the just-released Hindi film, Madras Cafe:

“Prakash Belawadi started and edited a weekly newspaper, Bangalore Bias (it shut down). He has begun so many enterprises, a media school among them, that I have lost count just of those he has been involved in since 2000, and would not be surprised if he has too.

“Belawadi began his career as a journalist and worked for Vir Sanghvi’s Sunday. He remains a columnist and a first rate one. He has the best quality a columnist can have and that, according to Graham Greene, is never to be boring.

“Belawadi has a dangerous lack of ideology that makes him an aggressive and unpredictable debater. He can casually assume a position, often contrary to one he held a couple of days ago, and unpack a ferocious argument. Like all good men, he likes a fight, and like all good men it is promptly forgotten. He has a quality that is admirable among men.

“He is restless and tireless, and totally uncaring for the middle-class ambitions that most of us cannot let go of, and few of us ever achieve.”

“Living life below the radar can be an onerous task particularly for the spouses of Indian Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) spies. To give expression to husbands, wives and children of India’s cloak and dagger operators, R&AW launched its first in-house magazine (aptly named Anamika) last week.

“Led by Neeta Tripathi, wife of R&AW chief Sanjeev Tripathi, and some spouses of spies who would rather remain unnamed, the colourful magazine provides an insight into the world of R&AW with sections based on identification processes such as retina scans, fingerprinting, bar codes and footprints.

“It has a section on the profiles of wives of previous spy masters with children contributing poems, photographs and paintings to the glossy magazine. Plans are afoot to make the magazine a monthly affair with the hope that the government does not bring it under the ambit of the Official Secrets Act. No cover after the cover page.”